Every airfield, and a great many other places suffer these sort of people. Without wishing to put down the odd genuinely aggreived complainant, many of them seem to be professional complainers with nothing better to do. (In a previous life, we had a chap who lived next to our University boatyard, he used to record every coming and going and make regular complaints; there was a distinct sense of shaudenfreuder (Sp?) when we heard he'd been carted off to hospital with hypothermia after sitting out in his garden all night making note of all our comings and goings).
A first, or even second, complaint about noise or low flying should always be treated very seriously. Some people get well into double figures, and do become nothing but a nuisance, sounds like your complainant may well be one such, and your instructor recognises him as such. These blighters never really go away, but there are ways to deal with them, such as:-
- Make dealing with complaints a punishment duty for badly behaved airfield staff
- Ask for registration, colour, and description. If they have a reg, the actualities can be investigated - such as in this case. If not, look for other details that allow you to check the details (without wasting too much time) and explain why no rule was broken, or (better still) the aircraft was not based at your airfield.
- Never respond to complaints too quickly, it gives them a sense of power (and if, as occasionally happens, they had a genuine greivance, you need time to have checked all the facts anyway).
- On each occasion, make sure you're in a position to either demonstrate that nothing was done wrong, or that the culprit has been identified and dealt with.
- Never, ever, ever, give out a pilots details, try to be as impersonal as possible.
G